need help

This assignment asks you to complete more of your Story Map, by further refining your topic and justification, creating an outline and adding three annotated sources. Create a Story Map (it can be new or an addition to your earlier draft) that includes the following features:

1) A title slide/page with a topic sentence 

2) A justification slide/page answering the questions, "how does your topic relate to the course?" and "how is your research geographical in nature?" that includes your name/student ID#

3) An outline of your planned narrative - essentially how you will frame your research

4) And three annotated sources, answering two questions for each source:

-what is the article/video, etc. about? (a summary)

-how did it contribute to your overall understanding of your topic?

In total, you need four distinct sections: a title slide/page, a justification slide/page, an outline (can be over multiple pages or using multiple text bocks or transitions) and three citations with notes, answering the two questions for each source.

· no specific citation format is necessary, but you must be consistent with your three sources, no URLs - Wikipedia and other general, crowdsourced sites or blogs are not adequate sources

· your three annotations should either be featured on different slides/pages, or must be different scrolling blocks of text 

Very Important: you must make your Story Map "public" by selecting the globe icon. Links that are unreadable due to being saved as "private" will not be graded.

This assignment is due by Thursday of Week 7 at midnight.

Here is an example of an annotated source:

Simon, Julian L. The Ultimate Resource 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

What I learned: Julian Simon is an economist who, for decades, has done battle with demographers and scientists over issues of human population growth and its effects on economic development, natural resources, and environmental degradation. Simon’s basic premise that so many people have a hard time with, is that human beings are making the world a better place, and that more people can only improve it. Any environmental problems that may arise due to population growth are only temporary, because as he wishfully asserts, more people on the planet means there is more brain-power to solve these problems, and therefore, people are the ultimate Resource.

Simon’s chapters on pollution emphasize microbial pollution, and how we’ve overcome traditional diseases like cholera and typhus through improved sanitation in our cities, which  relates most to my research for this project. He admits that his “definition” of pollution is different from that of other, and barely mentions the types of man-made pollutants, such as synthetic organic chemicals, that often leave a decades-long legacy in the soil and water. He reluctantly admits that these do pose a problem, but he has no remedy to that. The reader is left to infer, based on Simon’s repeated mantra, that someone someday will solve that problem, so in the meantime we should just keep happily applying them to our textiles, houses, forests and crops.

After reading for a while one comes to understand that Simon’s approach to these subjects are driven by his underlying philosophy that people are the only things of value on the planet. While many people share this view, what makes Simon unique is his militant denial that any scientific evidence indicates human activities and consumption patterns might threaten the lives and welfare of people around the globe. Despite a significant body of scientific evidence, he denies there is any problem and that we should to consume our way through the current stage of global economic development.

How this relates to the topic and the class more generally:  Simon has chosen to look only at one tiny indicator of the effect of population growth: price declines of certain resources. He doesn’t acknowledge the imbalance in consumption and how this relates to risk. This is very convenient for Simon, because for many applications, plastics have now been substituted for metals, for example, and consumption is less clear than having more children. He makes no mention of the impact on natural ecosystems, tropical forests, coastal and marine resources, arable land, and most importantly, adequate fresh water. He also doesn't identify how this is different in different places. In his narrowly defined scope, which denies the intricate web of relationships between species, the biosphere, regions, cultures, nations, etc., Simon says the biggest threat to the world is the “thought pollution” of the doomsayers like Paul Ehrlich. It might be easy to write this as an academic as part of a book, but much different when you look at how people live differently throughout our world. This suggests that there is still some obvious difference in the ways the world is conceptualized and written about, and this fills a gap in my research in showing how different thinkers interpret risks via environmental destruction.